Spanish

Spanish has about 485 million native speakers, second only to Mandarin, and is an official language in 20 countries.

Context

Spanish grew out of the Latin spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and spread across the Atlantic with the Spanish empire from the late 1400s onward. Today most of its native speakers live in the Americas, with Mexico alone home to more speakers than Spain.

Native-speaker rankings count people who learned the language from birth. On that measure Spanish sits second, behind Mandarin Chinese. When second-language speakers are included, English and others move ahead of it in total speakers, so the ranking depends on the measure used.

Counts of around 485 million are estimates drawn from national censuses and survey data, and they differ between publishers. The number of countries with Spanish as an official language is commonly given as 20, a figure that depends on whether territories and partly recognized uses are counted. Equatorial Guinea in Africa is also among the countries where Spanish has official status.

Spanish is also widely taught as a foreign language, and in the United States it is among the most commonly spoken languages other than English, which adds to its global reach beyond the countries where it is official.